Thanks to recent “data”, I am sad to report that it is no longer permitted to talk about the following topics until all the other problems in the world have been completely solved, beginning with global poverty and ending with the fact that there is nowhere near my apartment to get Slurpees. I understand that this will be a difficult adjustment for many of you, and I sympathize, but “data”. Here is the list of embargoed discussions:

- Any complaints about the War on Christmas. This is not a thing. I promise, you can celebrate Christmas in any way you choose up to and including drinking three bottles of Old Overholt and puking yourself to death all over the local crèche. No one is taking your Christmas away. You can talk about Jesus until His surely imminent return and the law will do nothing to stop you. The cashier at Wal-Mart saying “happy holidays” is not a form of oppression.

- Similarly, no more talk about the Obama Administration taking your guns away. It’s just not going to happen. As long as you keep shoveling money at the NRA, and you will because you are an easily manipulated dunce, not even the tiniest little baby steps will be taken toward the slightest bit of firearms regulation. All you are doing by stockpiling ammo is helping put the children of Winchester executives through college. The government — or a Republican one, anyway — is more likely to take your Medicare and Social Security away than it is your guns. Just…just calm down.

- Complaints about being asked to press 1 for English. In fact, complaining about anything that “inconveniences” you for less than five seconds is forbidden from this point forward.

- Hand-wringing over the fact that there are now more ‘minority’ babies than there are white onesˆ. Look, honkies: the only reason you would need to worry about this is if you have consistently treated non-whites like shit for all of recorded history. And you haven’t done that, have you? You have? Oh. Well, in that case, there are two options for you: either stop reading this and get fucking so you can shore up the stockpile of Cadens, Makaylahs, Brysons, and Dakotas; or start treating the dark-skinned kids decently so they won’t want to put you up against a wall once they’re old enough to start buying the guns Obama didn’t get around to outlawing. I’ll leave it to you to decide which will be easier.

- How Muslims are taking over the country and will soon impose their evil Sharia law on us. This isn’t even remotely happening in Europe, where there are a lot more Muslims than there are here. Muslims, on the other hand, would be pretty justified in worrying that Americans are going to take over their country and impose their laws and standards, but let that one drift.

- The disgraceful manner in which everyone but you chooses to raise their children

- Decrying the death of pop music. Look, I understand. You’re old now. It took me by surprise, too, and there was nothing pleasant about it. But let’s not pretend that there’s been a cultural apocalypse that just happened to coincide with the appearance of your first gray hair.

- The defense of worthless garbage on the basis that you “don’t want to have to think about things” or that “you just want to turn your brain off for a while”. First of all, if there is one problem America most certainly does not suffer from, it is thinking too much about anything. Second, what do you do that your brain is so fucking taxed? Rough day down at the copy-editing factory? Lose a thumb entering numbers into that Access database, did we? The whole idea of the necessity of escapism is sheer bafflegab; as my friend Tom Block put it, “an escape from what? We live in Disneyland, for crying out loud.” If exercising your brain is causing you that much fucking grief, stick an ice pick in your earhole and be done with it.

- Saying that anything, especially the pointing out of obvious racism, is the new racism. No. It is not. Racism is the old racism, and is also the new racism, on account of its being racist.

- Defending the shitty behavior of anyone, but especially famous people, government officials, or huge corporations, by pointing out that “they didn’t do anything illegal”. When did we become a nation of unpaid trial lawyers? Unless someone’s paying me at least three figures an hour to do so, I’m not particularly interested in acting as a loophole detector for some million-dollar cretin. And for a country that is relentlessly and drearily moralistic about just about everything else, we seem to delight in doing free PR when it comes to letting rich people off the hook. It may come as a shock, but people like this literally make the laws, so explaining in a patronizing tone that some egregious misdeed that would shame anyone’s grandmother wasn’t technically against the law isn’t the dust-off-your-hands-and-walk-away defense that people seem to think it is.

Leonard Pierce is a freelance writer wandering around Texas with no sleep or sense of direction. If you give him money he will write something for you. If you are nice to him he may come to your house and get drunk.